All I have just written is a lyrical digression. Literary critics like to warn writers against them: they upset the natural order of things and serve only to confuse readers, so they say. But it seems to me that there’s no reason why one shouldn’t write an entire book this way – freely and without the slightest constraint – submitting to nothing other than the uninterrupted flow of ideas and imagination. Perhaps this is the only way to achieve complete, total expression.
All the same, I must get back to the firinka, the maize bread and that autumn in Odessa.
The lack of food never bothered me much, particularly after I acquired two tins of concentrated Dutch coffee from the cook on the French steamship Dumont d’Urville, then in port. I traded him a packet of Stamboli tobacco for it. The tobacco had once belonged to my father and for some reason Mama had saved it for years and later given it to me. The Dumont d’Urville was berthed next to an English destroyer at the Quarantine Pier. The sailors from the destroyer played football on the pier all day. The black and yellow steamers of the Lloyd Triestino line called regularly from Trieste and Venice. Groups of Greek sailors walked the streets of Odessa. Their blue uniforms, white gaiters with little round buttons and broad cutlasses looked old-fashioned and theatrical.
Odessa was full of an incredible mix of people that year. The small-time stock exchange gamblers and black marketeers were overrun by an invasion of ruthless and brutal speculators fleeing from what they themselves spitefully called ‘Sovdepia’. The local dealers could only shake their heads and sigh – gone were the good old days when a single crumpled bill of lading for a single wagonload of lemon extract in Arkhangelsk could change hands for a whole month among the patrons of the Fanconi Café, rising and falling in price so that everyone could make a turn ‘on the difference’. Arkhangelsk was farther away than Mars, and lemon extract had long been a myth. But this didn’t bother the black marketeers. Their dealings sounded like a loud game at the lunatic asylum. They haggled until they were hoarse, shook hands over deals, took umbrage, and at times this load of lemon extract or some equally mythical cargo of sponges (Porto Franco Patras, Greece) ended in loud and seemingly endless rows. Sometimes actual deals were made – for a package of saccharine, a batch of old braces or a suspicious-looking packet of sal ammoniac. At the time sal ammoniac wasn’t cheap. It was a popular substitute for yeast.
But the speculators pouring in from the north put these peaceful, philosophical locals to shame with the sheer audacity of their deal making. Brilliant diamonds, from the tsar’s own crown, of course; crisp new sterling and franc notes; luxurious scented furs straight from the shoulders of Petrograd’s most famous beauties – all this and more passed into the hands of razor-stubbled Greek merchants. They did a particularly lucrative business selling the landed estates of the old nobility in provinces all over Mother Russia.
Every evening, one could see many well-known figures mingling with the flower girls on Deribasovskaya Street. Most of them, it was true, were looking rather shabby and agitated by the epidemic of outlandish rumours. In this respect, Odessa was way ahead of all the other southern towns. The rumours were indeed outlandish but frightening too. They blew into the city on the gusty north wind from the Kherson steppes. The Soviet army was charging south, demolishing covering forces, tightening the noose around the Whites, cutting off their escape routes. The Whites’ thin front line was breaking like rotten thread, one minute here, the next there.
Every time the front was broken, more deserters flooded into Odessa. Drunken noise filled the bars until morning – women shrieked, dishes crashed, shots rang out. The defeated tried to settle accounts and figure out who among them were the traitors responsible for Russia’s destruction. The white skulls on the sleeves of the officers of the ‘Death Battalions’ were yellow with dirt and grease, and no longer scared anyone. The city lived from hand to mouth. According to official estimates, supplies of food and coal should have run out long ago, but, by some miracle, they hadn’t. Only the city centre had electricity, and even there the lights did little more than flicker dimly. No one acknowledged the Whites’ authority, including the Whites themselves.
Three thousand bandits from Moldavanka led by Mishka Yaponchikfn2 looted lazily, clumsily, half-heartedly. They were sated with fabulous hauls from their previous raids and wanted to relax after this exhausting work. They joked more than they stole, they caroused in the restaurants, they cried as they sang the heart-rending song of the death of Vera Kholodnaya: ‘Poor Runich weeps, / Over Vera’s grave.’
Runichfn3 had acted alongside Vera Kholodnaya. According to the lyrics, Vera begs him from her grave:
In bright cornflowers blue,
Do wreathe my cold breast.
With tears of love so true
Show that you loved me best.
One evening I walked back home to Chernomorskaya Street from the editorial office with Yakov Lifshitz, a journalist from Petrograd. Homeless, Lifshitz joined us as the third lodger at Dr Landesman’s. A short, dishevelled, restless man, he was known as ‘Yasha on Wheels’. This was because when he walked, he rolled from heel to toe with a strange rocking motion, something like a blotter absorbing ink on paper. Yasha didn’t appear to be walking but gliding as though on roller skates. His shoes even looked like ink blotters – the soles were bent in a convex arc.
‘Yasha on Wheels’ and I walked along, picking the small side streets and lanes to try to avoid the patrols. In one of them, two young men in matching jockey caps came out of a doorway. They stopped to have a smoke. We were walking right towards them, but they made no sign of moving. It looked as though they were waiting for us.
‘Thugs,’ I whispered to Yasha.
He snorted at this and said: ‘Nonsense! Thugs don’t work deserted streets like these. We need to check.’
‘How?’
‘By talking to them. It’s obvious.’
Yasha had a pet theory – always approach danger head on. He was convinced that this theory had saved him from many a tight spot.
‘What are we going to talk to them about?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘Any old thing. It makes no difference.’
Yasha walked quickly up to the two men and asked them out of the blue: ‘Could you tell me, please, how to get to Chernomorskaya Street?’
The young men began to politely explain it to him. It was complicated, and so it took them a long time to describe the route, especially because Yasha kept interrupting them. Finally, Yasha thanked them, and we went on our way.
‘There now, you see,’ said a triumphant Yasha. ‘My theory never fails.’
I agreed with him, and then, the very next moment, we heard the men call us. We stopped. They came up and one of them said: ‘You do know, of course, that everyone who goes past Alexandrovsky Park, which you’ll have to do to get to Chernomorskaya, is robbed of their coat?’
‘Really, everyone’s coat?’ Yasha said with a laugh.
‘Well, almost everyone,’ the young man corrected himself and smiled. ‘They’ll steal yours. That’s for sure. So, it’s better you take it off now. It can’t make any difference to you whether you lose it here in Kanatny Lane or at the park, right?’
‘Well, I guess you’re right …’ said Yasha, all flustered.
‘How nice of you. Now please be so kind.’
The young man flicked a knife out of his sleeve. I had never in my life seen such a long, beautiful knife. It was as sharp as a razor. He held it close to Yasha’s stomach.
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ the man with the knife said, ‘please remove everything from the pockets you might need, except money. Wonderful! I thank you. Goodnight! No, please, don’t bother,’ he said, turning to me, ‘one coat is plenty for us. Greed is the mother of all sins. On your way then, and don’t look back. It never pays to look back, does it?’